Worcester Youth Center hits 20, despite adversity

It is rather alarming, really, to think that a city could have been so cold and indifferent to such a large segment of its population as Worcester was to some young people in the early 1990s.

Social and recreational opportunities outside the traditional agencies such as the Boys & Girls Club were few, if any, for young people during those years, particularly those 18 and older and who were linked to gangs or were high school dropouts.

The city treated these young people like eyesores, and did its best to sweep them out of sight whenever they became too visible, which was what happened July 29, 1991, when 32 of them were arrested in front of the former Worcester Courthouse and charged with loitering, disturbing the peace and being a public nuisance.

"It was a very ethnically diverse group of kids," recalled Lynne Simonds, youth advocate and chair of the City Manager's Youth Council at the time.

"They were shackled and bruised by handcuffs that were too tight. That incident infuriated us because we know they didn't have a place to go. We know they were being stopped all the time and being charged with illegal assembly, even while coming from basketball games."

It was this incident that led Ms. Simonds and Anne Moriarty, then director of program development at Plumley Village, to use the Youth Council as a force for change.

Young people were recruited off the streets to join those who had regularly attended the council's Wednesday-evening meetings, and right from the beginning were empowered to plan and develop the initiative they believed would best serve their needs.

They decided on creating a nonprofit called the Worcester Youth Center and raised the funding to make it a reality.

The youth center, with Ms. Simonds as its first executive director, opened at 508 Main St. on July 29, 1994. That triumph, however, brought intense community scrutiny that threatened to destroy the center before it could even get its footing.

Business owners did not want it downtown. Neighborhood watch groups didn't like it at all. Forced to walk on pins and needles, the center became a prime focus of police. Charges of police intimidation by the young people and staff at the center became the norm, as were frequent arrests of young people attending the center.

In 1997, three staff members, including Adolfo Arrastia, who took over as executive director from Ms. Simonds, were pepper sprayed and arrested when they spoke up for some young people who were smoking just outside the center's entrance and were being asked by police to go back inside.

But the center had its supporters, such as its major financial benefactor, UMass Memorial Health Care, and its then-president and CEO, Dr. Peter Levine. And individuals like Allen Fletcher, who has served as the president of the youth center board of directors and who still sits on the board, and who once said, "We know all the kids are not angels, but we are committed to serving them."

And as the center celebrates its 20th anniversary next month, it is heartwarming to see that it has not lived up to the doomsday predictions of its critics; that it has indeed become not just a place where kids can go, but where they can go further.

Laurie Ross, the board's current president and Clark University professor, penned a chapter of her dissertation on the history of the youth center. She spoke of the commonality among the adults who have helped these young people make their center a reality.

"These young people were challenging to a lot of people, but these adults were not scared of them," she said.